Examining subgrid models of supermassive black holes in cosmological simulation
arXiv:1006.2879 · doi:10.1088/0004-637X/723/2/1308
Abstract
While supermassive black holes (SMBHs) play an important role in galaxy and cluster evolution, at present they can only be included in large-scale cosmological simulation via subgrid techniques. However, these subgrid models have not been studied in a systematic fashion. Using a newly-developed fast, parallel spherical overdensity halo finder built into the simulation code FLASH, we perform a suite of dark matter-only cosmological simulations to study the effects of subgrid model choice on relations between SMBH mass and dark matter halo mass and velocity dispersion. We examine three aspects of SMBH subgrid models: the choice of initial black hole seed mass, the test for merging two black holes, and the frequency of applying the subgrid model. We also examine the role that merging can play in determining the relations, ignoring the complicating effects of SMBH-driven accretion and feedback. We find that the choice of subgrid model can dramatically affect the black hole merger rate, the cosmic SMBH mass density, and the low-redshift relations to halo properties. We also find that it is possible to reproduce observations of the low-redshift relations without accretion and feedback, depending on the choice of subgrid model.
12 pages, 12 figures, revised from referee comments, accepted by ApJ
References in corpus (17)
- A unified model for AGN feedback in cosmological simulations of structure formation
- Formation of Supermassive Black Holes by Direct Collapse in Pregalactic Halos
- Intermediate and Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals -- Astrophysics, Science Applications and Detection using LISA
- Direct cosmological simulations of the growth of black holes and galaxies
- A primer on hierarchical galaxy formation: the semi-analytical approach
- Virial Scaling of Massive Dark Matter Halos: Why Clusters Prefer a High Normalization Cosmology
- The evolution of massive black hole seeds
- Rapid Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Galaxy Mergers with Gas
- Alignment of the spins of supermassive black holes prior to coalescence
- Supermassive black hole binaries in gaseous and stellar circumnuclear discs: orbital dynamics and gas accretion
- The Halo Mass Function: High-Redshift Evolution and Universality
- A Direct Multigrid Poisson Solver for Oct-Tree Adaptive Meshes
- Impact of tangled magnetic fields on AGN-blown bubbles
- AGN self-regulation in cooling flow clusters
- The Structure of Halos: Implications for Group and Cluster Cosmology
- Supermassive Black Hole Growth and Merger Rates from Cosmological N-body Simulations
- Black Hole Growth from Cosmological N-body Simulations